Block stars quit: ‘We won’t be bullied’

The Block frontrunners Mitch and Mark momentarily snapped on Sunday's episode, hitting back at the show for "bullying" and claiming to have been accused of cheating.

With the competition in its final days, the contestants' already stretched budgets are by this point non-existent.

Mitch and Mark have had a tough week - having always prided themselves on their budgeting, they were horrified to learn they were in fact almost $10,000 in arrears.

What little money they managed to claw back had to be spent on essentials: Namely, the 100-plus defects that foremen Keith and Dan had identified around their home needing to be fixed.

But during Sunday's episode, Mitch and Mark had other ideas, ripping up some tiling at the bottom of their staircase that the judges had hated last week, so they could replace it with a less divisive option.

To Keith and Dan, it was a needless extravagance compared to the essential fixes they still needed to do to get the house on the market.

Dan and Keith on The Block

"They've only got enough budget to finish the defects - yet they're in there ripping up tiles? It doesn't make sense," said a furious Dan.

"They're wasting money on retiling. They haven't got the coin to do that."

"We'll just rip this up and we'll leave it like this … and we'll sell it like this. Cos I'm not doing any more."

A pep talk from his partner kept Mark in the game: "We've got a week to go! We've invested too much to walk away. Don't give up. If they force us to not have a property to sell, we will be forced. But we are not going to give up - we need to try to get something that's auctionable," Mitch told him.

Speaking to the camera, Mitch said he had never imagined it would be so tough.

"I didn't think it was Survivor. It's feeling more like Survivor than The Block right now."